Yesterday, Site Stats said I had 5,515 Distinct Hosts Served (normaly it is 5-600). However, the Total Page Views was only 955 (HTML Requests - 897 and XML Reqs - 5. How can you get six times as many hits as page views?

John: I went back and read the entire old string of messages by clicking "here."

Perhaps Hotlinking is the problem, but you will notice there is a difference in my two my unusual statistic questions.

Back last June, the first listing under "Referer Summary" was 609 requests, more than the number of "Distinct Hosts Served." As you explained, it was not more than the number of HTML requests which is the more accurate way to measure hits.

However, on this past January 20, there was nothing weird about the "Referer Summary." Instead, this time ElvisBlog had 5,515 "Distinct Hosts Served" and HTML Requests was 897.

So, can Hotlinking be the cause both times:
- when "Distinct Hosts Served" is off the charts?
- when "Referer Summary" has massive requests from one site?

Of course, I have followed your instructions and read "Prohibit Linking to Content on Your Site." As instructed, I cleared the checkbox for "Allow Sourcing of Files and Images" back on June 9, 2008. I am sorry to report that this has not worked. Your message on that date stated, "Yes, unclicking "Allow Sourcing" means no more photos will go to Google Images." This has not happened. So, .jpg images on my blog are regularly hotlinked by others as well.

You have admitted before that certain element of the BlogHarbor formatting have not worked and needed updating. I believe that is the case with the "Allow Sourcing" feature. Would you please look into this and advise what you find.

I notice that a significant number of other bloggers have read my posts, but none have ever commented, other than you. I guess Hotlinking is not a problem unless your blog is about a huge pop culture icon and you post a lot of pictures. With Elvis fans all over the world, I can see why foreign sites would want to Hotlink my site. However they are leaching my bandwidth and this is costing me money.

I will really appreciate you getting to the bottom of this "Allow Sourcing" problem.

So, can Hotlinking be the cause both times:
- when "Distinct Hosts Served" is off the charts?
- when "Referer Summary" has massive requests from one site?

Yes and yes. That's exactly what you would see.

You have admitted before that certain element of the BlogHarbor formatting have not worked and needed updating. I believe that is the case with the "Allow Sourcing" feature. Would you please look into this and advise what you find.

Images that are hotlinked will not display, the Blogware server sends a 401 error message if the referer exists and it is not your host.

I notice that a significant number of other bloggers have read my posts, but none have ever commented, other than you.

Perhaps that's just because they don't have an answer for you.

I guess Hotlinking is not a problem unless your blog is about a huge pop culture icon and you post a lot of pictures.

I wouldn't say that is the case. I once posted a nice picture of a sunset. It was so nice that dozens of Myspace sites hotlinked as their background image. I don't think hotlinking is limited to images of pop culture icons.

John: I was pleased when I saw your answer a week ago. Thank you for running the test to verify that the (dis)allow sourcing feature was working.

It made me realize that it had been a few months since I actually checked images.Google to see which pictures from ElvisBlog people were linking to my site from. So, I did it again this past week. I am happy to report that none of the photos in my Nov, Dec and Jan posts were included. Your feature has certainly been working for these three months, and I trust that also means no other sites have been able to hotlink my photos from those three months. If images.Google can't get them, the pirates can't either, right?

Most of the photos on images.Google are old, posted before I disallowed sourcing in June. You once said the pictures would cycle off, but some go back a year or more. Do you know if popularity keeps some images on there while the less-clicked ones get booted after a while?

There are four ElvisBlog articles from August whose pictures do show up in Google images. These were posted after I disallowed sourcing. Was there any problem with your blocking feature back in August? And there are pictures from one post in early October that are on images.Google. Except for that, I could say that your feature to block photo sourcing has worked for the past five months.

I'll do another check in a few months and hopefully will have good news to report. Thank you.

Short answer here is that although it may be possible to directly retrieve and display an image, it is not possible to hotlink that image.

So although an image may appear in Google, that doesn't mean that is "hotlinkable". In short, don't be concerned if the image is in Google or not, really not so much an issue... All you need to know is that users can not hotlink your images...